Ever Since I Can Remember....

Ever since I can remember, I was Alex P. Keaton. For those not as old as me, Alex was a character portrayed by a very young Michael J. Fox on a 80’s sitcom called "Family Ties". Fox portrays a young boy in his early teens with an unparalleled knowledge of government and business for his age. Not to mention the business suits and brief case. Essentially that was me. The budding business man from birth always driven to the next conquest.

When I was 10 years old my local newspaper company attempted to derail my blossoming business scheme to monopolize newspaper delivery in my small town by imposing an age limit of 12 for their news carriers. I quickly went into action; emptying my piggy bank of every penny I had accumulated, and called together a meeting of all the towns’ 17 paperboys. After this meeting I was successful at buying the routes from 12 of the boys who in turn continued the interaction with the publisher. I then kept three of the routes for myself and subcontracted to nine other children under 12 with a desire to work retaining 40% of the profits for myself from each route. My net take home pay exceeded that of my fathers for two years.

My youth played host to one business venture after another some landing me into hot water. Like the year I took orders from my friends on what they wanted for Christmas. I then asked Santa for these items and those that I received I sold to the children for a fraction of the price. Turns out Santa does not exist. My parent’s rage; however, became quite real to me that year!

While in high school, I learned of a military program for which I could enter into my junior year and earn tons of cash towards my college education. Well, I gave up nine years worth of weekends and received very little in the way of educational benefit. This turned out to be one of my worst business decisions but I did get to serve Uncle Sam!

Upon graduating from high school, I enrolled at Penn State University, where I quickly found that academia alone was not enough to keep me mentally challenged. I took on a full-time job as a staffing manager with a local home health care company. After a year of learning the business I believed I could do it better myself and set out to prove it. My junior year of college, I leveraged as many credit cards as I could get my hands-on and started my own home health care company offering in home nursing and physical therapy services.

The biggest trick in making this business successful was convincing six figure health care professionals that we were the place they wanted to be. Within eight